Literacy - Online books

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Sometimes it is great for the class to listen (or watch) a story read by someone else. Here are some sites that will help.

Free sites

  • Storylineonline.net - stories read by famous Hollywood actors - this site has nice simple animations of the illustrations, and some of the actors have pretty good diction. Only about 20 stories here though.
  • Barnes and Noble Online Storytime - includes Eric Carle reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar
  • Read to Me Las Vegas (really!) - I admit, I didn't immediately recognise any of the stories on here.
  • Storynory.com - a range of fairy tales and classic tales, all just audio with the text on the same page
  • National Geographic Young Explorers - very simple books for K/1 and a strong American accent, but some good non-fiction
  • Oxford Owl - this requires free registration, so I haven't tried it out yet, but it looks promising
  • Magic Keys books - this site seems to have a good collection of books, some with audio. It is a bit slow so I don't know that it is reliable.
  • MrsP reads children's classics on YouTube. Here's an example: Goldilocks and the Three Bears
  • Reading Planet - seems to have a number of free books with animation and audio.
  • Speakaboos - lots of free stories here with simple animations.
  • Mem Reads Aloud - a small selection of Mem's stories read aloud by the author herself.
  • Robert Munsch - audio only, lots of stories that can be listened to online or downloaded.
  • Magic Keys - mostly illustrated only, some audio. I think these are stories written by independent authors for online distribution, none of the classics are here.

Paid sites

  • MightyBook currently costs only $29.95 per year. There are a number of free samples.
  • Tumblebooks.com - this site is normally by subscription but your local library may provide some access.

Lists of sites

Here are some lists in case you want to go hunting yourself. I may not have linked to some of these because they didn't suit my purposes.